BECKY STONE
THEATRE PERFORMANCE
This residency features a live Chautauqua performance integrated into the classroom experience.
About the Artist
Becky Stone has been a Chautauqua scholar since 2003. She moved to the mountains in 1978 with an undergraduate degree in Drama from Vassar College and a masters degree in Elementary Educational Counseling from Villanova University. By 2003, Becky was an established professional storyteller and actor in this region. She has researched and developed six characters: Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Maya Angelou, Mary Fields and Josephine Baker. Becky has performed these characters in North and South Carolina, Colorado, Ohio, Georgia, and Nebraska.
Residency Offering: The Art of Chautauqua
Chautauqua is an interactive performance that brings history alive. Chautauqua scholars spend at least one year researching a historical character with the goal of portraying that character in full costume. The character delivers a monologue and then answers questions from the audience in character for about 10-15 minutes.
The monologue can be an overview of the character’s life or cover particular events in which the character participated. Each presentation offers entertaining stories and insights into the period in which the character lived.
Residency Options
All options are 1 day for 40-90 minutes
Harriet Tubman (Grades 2-12)
The stories of Harriet Tubman can cover her growing up enslaved on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, her experiences conducting on the Underground Railroad, her work as a nurse and a spy during the Civil War, and her life until she died in 1913.
Maya Angelou (Grades 4-12)
The presentation of Dr. Angelou can cover the major influence that the written word had on her life, starting with the reading and writing she did when she was a voluntary mute from the age of 8 until she was 12. Hers is a story of remarkable scope and self-determination.
Rosa Parks (Grades 4-12)
Rosa Parks challenged the segregation law in the Jim Crow South by refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. That action sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, earning her the title of the “Mother of the Modern Civil Rights Movement.” Parks tells stories about growing up in Jim Crow Alabama, working as an activist and more.
Mary ‘Stagecoach’ Fields (Grades 4-12)
Stagecoach Mary Fields was the first Black woman to be employed as star route postal carrier in the United States. Born into slavery, but later becoming a postal carrier in the United States, Mary was known for her strength, courage, and independent spirit. She delivered mail through treacherous terrain, often armed to protect herself from bandits and wildlife.
Josephine Baker (Grades 4-12)
Josephine Baker was an African-American born in 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri who became an international star. She left home at the age of 13 with a vaudeville show. When Baker was 19 in 1925, she left New York for Paris, France, starring in a show that featured all Black singers, dancers, musicians, and comedians. She lived the rest of her life in France. In spite of being a French citizen, she became a civil rights activist, speaking at the 1963 March on Washington, and a spy and French Resistance fighter during World War II. In 2021, the French government installed Josephine Baker in the Pantheon.
Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray (Grades 9-12)
A North Carolinian whose goal was to end Jim Crow, she soon broadened her scope to include women’s and human rights. Dr. Murray was an attorney, a civil rights activist, a poet, a feminist, a writer, and a priest in the Episcopal Church. Her life is a story of empowerment through education and the written word. Her legal skills led to the Brown v Board of Education decision that ended segregation and to the securing of employment rights for women.